BioMed Central has gone beyond conventional scientific publishing and started including movie supplements to scientific papers. I saw this one in my e-mail box and couldn't resist. After all, if you don't have access to a microscope, equipped with a digital video camera, how are you supposed to see these ...
Okay, I'll grant that visiting Second Life can seem a bit uncomfortable, especially at first, but it does open some new doors and present an alternative to travel. In flu season, virtual visits could be the next best thing to being there. ( Yikes, that sounds like an ad. No ...
Long Branch, NJ, is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean, with long beaches and brand new shops and condos. It is also part of an area in, central New Jersey, where biotechnology education is entering an exciting time thanks to efforts of NJBEC, Bio-1, and a WIRED grant from ...
The National Science Foundation recently announced an ambitious plan to transform biology education across the United States called "Vision and Change." Funding for this mission is being provided by a new NSF grant program called "TUES" for Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science. This finding may have been a surprise to ...
Bora had an enjoyable post yesterday on obsolete lab skills. I can empathize because I have a pretty good collection of obsolete lab skills myself. These days I'm rarely ( okay, never) called upon to do rocket immunoelectrophoresis, take blood from a rat's tail, culture tumor cells in the anterior ...
A friend of mine; serial entrepreneur, and former president of Genetic Systems; Joe Ashley, told me once that starting a business is an unnatural act. Now that I've done it, I agree. Even with my multiple back-up plans, possible grants, and part-time activities, my stomach still hurts and my mind ...
A common theme I hear in talks on personalized medicine, is that increased access to genomic data and medical literature are changing the relationship between doctors and patients. Patients are through being passive recipients of paternalistic health care. They are demanding to participate and be treated as partners with health ...
Living in Seattle fosters a certain pessimism when it comes to large companies. Boeing has always been a poster child for employment uncertainty, regularly hiring large numbers of people and just as regularly, laying them off. Now, we have Microsoft and Amgen joining the club, with Microsoft layoffs impacting an ...
I love using molecular structures as teaching tools. They're beautiful, they're easy to obtain, and working with them is fun. But working with molecular structures as an educators can present some challenges. The biggest problem is that many of the articles describing the structures are not accessible, particularly those published ...
We had a great discussion in the comments yesterday after I published my NJ trees from some of the flu sequences. If I list all the wonderful pieces of advice that readers shared, I wouldn't have any time to do the searches, but there are a few that I want ...
Bertalan Meskó shares his strategies for keeping up and gives instructions so you can do the same. He shows how you can save your favorite PubMed searches and have NCBI send you e-mails about new papers. He describes some third party PubMed tools that make pretty graphs. Last, he discusses ...
Pfizer has pledged to donate up to $10,000 to the cause of science education, through Donorschoose.org, but only if enough of you, dear readers go to Big Think: Think Science Now and vote for your favorite video. If you're not familiar with Pfizer, they're a pretty well-known drug company. You ...
I don't remember learning about plasma when I took physics, but it's amazing stuff. Last week at the Hi-Tec conference in Arizona, I got to learn how an electromagnetic field can be used to push plasma around a tube. Community college students get to play with the coolest toys! Here's ...
We have lots of DNA samples from bacteria that were isolated from dirt. Now it's time to our own metagenomics project and figure out what they are. Our class project is on a much smaller scale than the honeybee metagenomics project that I wrote about yesterday, but we're using many ...
Not content with his recent exploits in human experimentation and cavorting with Plosites in San Francisco, Professor Steve Steve jetted across the country once again, last week, hitting both both Blacksburg, VA and Seattle, WA, and creating pandemonium wherever he went. And raising the question - how does he get ...
Professor Steve Steve, recently accused of consorting with a certain Washington madam came clean today with an alibi that he claims, proves the allegations are nothing more than malicious lies. Dr. Steve insists that he was at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center doing experiments with teachers! And he has ...
" By night all cats are gray" - Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote I've always liked Siamese cats. Students do, too. "Why Siamese cats wear masks" is always a favorite story in genetics class. So, when I opened my January copy of The Science Teacher, I was thrilled to see ...
Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF! These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were: Peking University ...
Every year students in the Puget Sound area gather together at the Biotech Expo to celebrate the life sciences and compete for prizes. Although their projects are diverse in nature, they compete in categories like research, art, journalism, drama, music, and others, all the students learn about science as part ...
This morning, I learned that congress wants to reverse the advances made by NIH and go back to restricting access to scientific publications. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (California) are co-sponsoring a bill to restore the limits on public access to NIH-funded research. I've written many ...
What happens when a group of streptococci stick to cells in your throat and start to make toxins? Your body fights back by making clones. The animated video, Fighting Infection by Clonal Selection, from Etsuko Uno and Drew Berry is so good that if I didn't know better, I would ...
A few weeks ago I attended a education conference at Pacific Science Center entitled, " A Conversation that Can Change the World." It was interesting. Everyone was pretty enthusiastic at the meeting and there was a lot of positive energy. We got to see Theresa Britschgi from Seattle Biomedical Research ...
Yet another Bio-Link blog post. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2641","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"i-8d565ab60bb22abb6b2c9703da7d73c1-bridge_group.jpg"}}]] The San Francisco bay area has experienced phenomenal growth in both the number of biotech companies and the need to find employees. But, no matter how many attractions entice potential employees to move to the Bay Area, they still face the problem of finding ...
Judging from their groans and moans, I think sometimes that it's hard for kids to grow up with two scientists as parents. Still, over the years our kids have come to accept (and ignore) that we seem to babble in some kind of strange code peppered with discussions of DNA ...
The HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is a non-profit organization that opened it's doors in April, 2008. One of the great things about this institute is it's commitment to sharing biotech knowledge with the surrounding community. For the general public, HudsonAlpha has a ongoing written series on biology topics called Biotech ...
We often see memorials written about famous scientists, but we rarely see them about the people who work in the background to help people learn the science in the first place. Ron was one of those people whose work inspired teachers and helped spark excitement in science students throughout the ...
Two interesting events are happening, Monday night, Oct. 27th. At the UW: Josh Rosenau from the National Center for Science Education will be speaking at 6 pm about Creationist attacks on science education. (Josh is also a Science Blogger). In Ravenna, at Third Place Pub: Ted White from the Seattle ...
Last night we went to a pub to hear about some new technology for diagnostic testing. A wonderful speaker, Karen Hedine from Micronics came and told us about the work that her company is doing. She brought along a demonstration machine and passed the machine and several plastic test chambers ...
This morning Bora and I both gave talks in Second Life. Since this was a pretty new experience for me, I thought I'd share my thoughts on it. Ever since the days when I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, I thought it might be fun to be in one. But ...
I heard some intriguing presentations this week about education in Second Life, but I happen know that there is an open-source, free (?) alternative called "Croquet." Do any of you have experience with Croquet vs. Second Life? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. I attended two talks ...
The general steps in genome sequencing were presented in the earlier installments ( there are links at the bottom of the page), but it's worth repeating them again since each of the earlier steps has a bearing on the outcome of those that come later. These are: Break the genome ...
To the ancient Greeks, a chimera was a kind of monster, with the body of a goat, the tail of a dragon, and a lion's head. To geneticists, a chimera can be an animal that's derived from two embryos, such as a transgenic mouse. Or if the organism is a ...
How to win the X PRIZE in genomics In October, 2006, the X PRIZE foundation announced that second X prize would focus on genomics. The first team to successfully sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days will win $10 million dollars. And I would venture to guess, that the winning ...
Have you ever wondered how people actually go about sequencing a genome? If they're sequencing a chicken genome, do they raise chickens in the lab and get DNA from the eggs? Does the DNA sequence come out in one piece? Why is there so much talk about computers? What are ...
A few years ago, the General Biology students at the Johns Hopkins University began to interrogate the unseen world. During this semester-long project, they study the ecosystems of the Homewood campus, and engage in novel research by exploring the microbial ecosystems in different sections of the campus. Biology lab students ...
To have an effect, a molecule must bind to a receptor and trigger a signal. Studying a receptor's structure can give us insights about the way this triggering process works. Capsaicin is a fascinating molecule that puts the "pep" into peppers. Curiously, the amount of capsaicin in a pepper is ...
When my parents were young, summer made cities a scary place for young families. My mother tells me children were often sent away from their homes to relatives in the country, if possible, and swimming pools were definitely off limits. The disease they feared, poliomyelitis, and the havoc it wrecked ...
Bio-Link is accepting applications for this year's National Summer Fellows forum, June 2-6th, in Berkeley, CA. You can get an application at www.bio-link.org I'll be there, doing some kind of bioinformatics workshop. I'll probably be talking about either metagenomics or comparing protein structures and drug resistance, but if you have ...
Since I'm an adjunct faculty member at a couple of community colleges, I'm able to delete most of my e-mail with barely a glance. But this one made my jaw drop! Dear Educators: Alliance Library System and LearningTimes are pleased to announce an exciting conference featuring science and virtual worlds ...
This morning I attended a "bloggers-only" conference call with Dr. Eric Green and the folks from the NIH Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to hear about NHGRI's new strategic plan. The new plan represents a shift away from viewing the genome through a lens marked "for research use only" and ...
When female bloggers get death threats for comparing a Batman movie to a poor business plan, and friends can have their lab fire bombed for doing plant genetics, it's sometimes a little scary to step into the fray and take a stand on controversial issues. But that's the point. We ...
A few weeks ago I heard a story from a friend in Oklahoma. She works with high school science teachers, helping them learn how to add biotechnology to their courses. One teacher, in particular, has taken the new science activities to heart. Her students did so well, they won a ...
Funding raising drives come and go but the need to educate the coming generations in science and math never goes away. With your help, teachers can help their students. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects individuals, like you, to classrooms in need. The average public school teacher spends $500 ...
ScienceBlogs and science bloggers, in general, have enthusiastically supported fund-raising efforts by DonorsChoose for the past two years, and we're doing it once again for 2008. DonorsChoose works like this: teachers write descriptions of what they want and how they'll use it for teaching, and submit their proposals to DonorsChoose ...
Nick's post on Amantadine resistance in swine flu was so interesting, I had to look at the protein structures myself. I couldn't find any structures with the S31N mutation that Nick discussed, but I did find some structures with the M2 protein and Amantadine. Not only are these structures beautiful ...
In part I, I wrote about my first semester of teaching on-line and talked about our challenges with technology. Blackboard had a database corruption event during finals week and I had all kinds of struggles with the Windows version of Microsoft Excel. Mike wrote and asked if I thought students ...
On-line courses were a still a new phenomenon when I was teaching full-time. Our school was pretty gung-ho about on-line education but many instructors were skeptical, some were still lamenting having to learn how to use a computer and losing the services that used to be provided by departmental secretaries ...
Many science experiments are carefully thought out. Often, the procedures we follow have been thoroughly tested. We measure everything we can at every point that we can, so that we can determine if a procedure, like isolating DNA, is working properly and if the procedure doesn't work, we can determine ...
BLAST is a collection of programs that are used to compare sequences (DNA, RNA, or protein) to larger collections of sequences that are stored in databases. I've used BLAST as a teaching tool for many years, partly because it's become a standard tool for biological work and partly because it's ...
This quarter, I'm using a wiki with my bioinformatics class and posting sometimes about the things that I learn. Two things I've been experimenting with are: Setting up pages for individual students so they can take notes while they're working. Embedding a Google form into one of my wiki pages ...
